Here's Why There's Suddenly a Bunch of New Payphones in NYC

The NYC relics have popped up in Fort Greene, Williamsburg, and Downtown Manhattan over the last few weeks

If you’re walking around the city this week and spot a new payphone in a place you absolutely know there hasn’t been one in three decades or so, it’s not your mind playing tricks. What we have here instead is a bit of a nostalgia play from director Darren Aronofsky, who appears to be handling the marketing push for his new film, Caught Stealing.

Aronofsky, a critically acclaimed and Oscar-winning Manhattan Beach native, has teamed up with speakeasy whisperer N.D. Austin and Jordan Seiler, the owner of a functional network of existing payphones, to create an experiential element to the rollout of the new project, hoping an appeal to the city’s grittier, less centralized, and more offline decades comes across the line. The phones, recently spotted in Fort Greene, Williamsburg, and downtown Manhattan, don’t even make calls—they make recommendations, guiding people towards events and NYC institutions like the century-old Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery on Houston Street or a dance party at iconic Bushwick DIY space, Rubulad.

It’s all to fill seats and build buzz for Caught Stealing, a film about a former professional baseball player breaking bad in 1990s NYC, starring Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz, and Bad Bunny. It arrives in theaters this Friday, August 29. Watch the trailer below and, should you come across one of these fossils in the wild, let us know where they sent you.